Meet the Geminoid F, the first humanoid robot to star in a movie

The resemblance to an actual human is uncanny

Meet the Geminoid F, the most popular in a series of humanoid robots built by Hiroshi Ishiguro Laboratories, and the first to become a bona fide movie star.

The robot, which is designed to look like an adult woman, has been built as part of an ongoing project in Osaka University in Japan.

While still a work in progress, Geminoid F's creator Hiroshi Ishiguro says that it provides the basic means to assess human-robot interactions as a new branch of robotics called "Android Science".

"The most important technology for the tele-operation system is synchronization between speech utterances and lip movements," says Ishiguro in a research paper. This goes some way to avoiding the uncanny valley issue, but it isn't just mechanical.

The Geminoid F was shown off at the World Robot Conference in China last week and already has an ardent fan-following, with people queueing for the chance to meet it and take selfies.

It is also perhaps the only robot to have an IMDB entry for its role in 2015's post-apocalyptic film Sayonara with the film shown at the Tokyo International Film Festival.